‘Death was everywhere’: Syria’s chemical weapon victims share their trauma

Eastern Ghouta, Syria – Amina Habya was still awake when she heard screaming outside her window in Zamalka, Ghouta, on the night of August 21, 2013.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad had just fired rockets filled with sarin gas at Zamalka, and people were shouting: “Chemical weapon attack! Chemical weapon attack!”

She quickly soaked a towel in water and put it over her nose as she ran up to the fifth – and highest – floor of her building with her daughters and sons-in-law.

Because chemicals are typically heavier than air, Habya was aware the upper levels of buildings may be less contaminated.

They were safe, but Habya later discovered that her husband and son, who weren’t home, and her daughter-in-law and two children, who were asleep, had all suffocated to death.

“Death was everywhere,” said 60-year-old Habya, sitting on a plastic chair outside her home wearing a black abaya, black hijab and a black shawl around her face.

Habya still lives in Zamalka in a modest one-floor apartment with her married daughters, remaining grandchildren and sons-in-law. Their building is one of few intact in the neighbourhood.

The others were levelled by regime air strikes during the war.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, she held up a photo of eight children wrapped in black blankets, corpses retrieved after the sarin gas attack, suffocated to death.

Two of them were her grandchildren.

“This one is my granddaughter and this one my grandson,” she told Al Jazeera, gesturing to two dead children in the photo.

About 1,127 people were killed in the attacks, while 6,000 others suffered acute respiratory symptoms, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

“[Rescuers] found five people dead in a bathroom. Some [corpses] were found on the stairs and some on the floor. Others [died] while they were fast asleep,” Habya said.

A legacy of chemical warfare

On December 8, al-Assad fled to Russia with his family before opposition fighters could reach the capital.

For 13 years, he and his family waged a devastating war on their people, rather than surrender power to the popular uprising against him that started in March 2011.

Al-Assad’s regime systematically launched air attacks on civilians, starved communities, and tortured and killed tens of thousands of real and perceived dissidents.

But the regime’s use of chemical weapons – banned by international laws and conventions – was possibly one of the darkest aspects of the conflict.

According to a 2019 report by the Global Policy Institute, the Syrian regime carried out 98 percent of the 336 chemical weapon attacks during the war, while the rest were attributed to ISIL (ISIS).

The confirmed attacks took place over a six-year period between 2012 and 2018 and usually targeted rebel-controlled areas as part of a broader policy of collective punishment, the report said.

Towns and districts in the suburbs of Damascus were hit dozens of times, as were villages in governorates like Homs, Idlib and Rif Dimashq.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that about 1,514 people suffocated to death in these attacks, including 214 children and 262 women.

In Eastern Ghouta, victims told Al Jazeera they still can’t shake the harrowing memory, even as they are filled with joy and relief that al-Assad is finally gone.

Joy and despair

Before the war, Habya says, she neither hated nor loved al-Assad, but she grew terrified as the regime began to brutally repress protesters – and uninvolved civilians.

In early 2013, regime officers abducted and jailed her son while he was praying in his shop. Months later, they killed her son’s family in the chemical weapon attack.

Habya never saw her son again and just found out that he died in the notorious Sednaya Prison in 2016.

Habya believes the regime particularly repressed and persecuted civilians in Ghouta because it sits on Damascus’s doorstep and rebels had taken it over.

“We became so scared,” Habya told Al Jazeera. “Just the name ‘Bashar al-Assad’ would instil fear in all of us.”

As the al-Assad regime committed a growing list of atrocities, then-US President Barack Obama told reporters in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line” and – if crossed – would compel him to use military force in Syria.

After the sarin gas attack in August 2013, Obama was pressured to follow through on his warning, which risked angering his constituents who believed the United States should not interfere in foreign conflicts.

According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, which was conducted between August 29 and September 1 of that year, only 29 percent of Obama’s base of Democrats believed the US should strike Syria, while 48 percent outright opposed. The rest were unsure.

In the end, Obama called off the strikes and accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to allow the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – a United Nations body – to destroy stockpiles of chemical weapons in Syria.

Although the OPCW did get rid of many chemical weapons the Syrian government claimed to have by the time its initial mission concluded on September 30, 2014, the UN body said the government may have concealed some stockpiles.

After the regime’s recurrent use of chemical weapons in the war, OPCW took the decision to suspend Syria from the Chemical Weapons Convention in April 2021 for failing to uphold its obligations.

Hungry for justice

The lack of repercussions against the regime angered Syrians, with many victims from the 2013 attack still longing for justice.

Habya’s daughter Eman Suleiman, 33, poked her head out from the side of the door and told Al Jazeera she wants the global community to help hold al-Assad accountable for his atrocity crimes, suggesting the International Criminal Court (ICC) could indict him.

However, Syria is currently not a member of the Rome Statute, a treaty that confers jurisdiction to the court. The only way the ICC can open a case in Syria is if the new authorities sign and ratify the statute, or if the UN Security Council passes a resolution permitting the court to investigate atrocities in Syria.

Al-Assad and his closest aides could theoretically be charged with a long list of grave abuses, including the use of chemical weapons, which may amount to a crime against humanity, according to Human Rights Watch.

In November 2023, French judges approved an arrest warrant for al-Assad, which accuses him of ordering the use of chemical weapons on Eastern Ghouta.

The warrant was granted under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction”, which enables any country to try alleged war criminals for grave crimes committed anywhere in the world.

“We want to see [al-Assad] on trial, sentenced and held accountable,” Suleiman told Al Jazeera.

“We just want our rights. Nothing less and nothing more. In any country in the world, if someone kills another person, they’re held accountable,” she said.

But even if some form of justice is achieved, no verdict or jail sentence will bring back the dead, Habya says.

“God will punish every single oppressor,” she sighed.

Speaking out

Five years after the first chemical weapon attack, the al-Assad regime perpetrated another one in Eastern Ghouta on April 7, 2018.

This time, chlorine gas was used, killing about 43 people and injuring scores, according to a report by the OPCW.

Both al-Assad and his key ally Russia claimed Syrian rebel groups and rescue workers staged the attack.

They then reportedly intimidated and muzzled victims after capturing eastern Ghouta days later.

Tawfiq Diam, 45, said regime officers “visited” his home a week after his wife and four children – Joudy, Mohamed, Ali and Qamr, who were between eight and 12 years old – were killed in the chlorine attack.

“They told us that they didn’t use chemical weapons, but it was the terrorists and armed groups who did,” Diam recalled, with resentment.

Diam added that regime officials brought along a journalist from a Russian network who requested an interview about the chemical weapons attack.

He said he told the journalist and security officers what they wanted to hear under duress.

Now, he says, he can finally speak freely about the attack after living in fear of the regime for so long.

Habya agrees, saying the fear she carried in her heart under al-Assad’s rule disappeared when he fled.

She remembers feeling overwhelmed with joy when she asked dozens of young men outside her home why they were cheering and celebrating on December 8.

“They told me: ‘The donkey, Bashar, is finally gone.”

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